


visit philadelphia

by screamlet



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Banter, Dialogue Heavy, Humor, M/M, Prisoner of War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5169530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Among others, the British have captured Laurens.”<br/>“WHAT?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	visit philadelphia

**Author's Note:**

> Summer, 1780  
> Set between "Right Hand Man" and "A Winter's Ball" in the musical's timeline.

Hamilton arrived in Washington’s tent just after the morning post and just in time to begin sifting through it at the General’s command: “Look for anything coming from Philadelphia.” Hamilton set aside those letters for him, then turned his attention to the remaining correspondence. 

Once Washington had reviewed the few Philadelphia messages, he sat back and laughed. “Hamilton,” he said. “I have bad news and good news.”

“Oh?” Hamilton asked, trying to keep the overwhelming curiosity out of his face. 

“The bad news,” Washington began. “General Lincoln’s attack on Savannah didn’t go as we expected.” Hamilton’s attention snapped on Washington as he continued. “Among others, the British have captured Laurens.”

“WHAT?” Hamilton asked. “What do you—he’s a prisoner? They _captured_ him? He’s—they put him in a _prison_? Is he alive? What—are they going to—and hold on, the British took _Savannah_ , was that something we—”

“No, go on, Alexander, it’s fine, this is productive,” Washington said. “Didn’t I say I had good news, too?”

“Did you?” Hamilton asked. “Is there good news? Why wouldn’t you open with the good news?”

“Because this is the most I’ve laughed in a month,” Washington said, not laughing openly but maybe, surely, somewhere inside. “The good news is that Colonel Laurens was transported last month from Savannah to Philadelphia, of all damn places, only two days’ hard ride from our camp here in scenic central New Jersey.”

“And I’m going to break him out of prison!” Hamilton said.

Washington stared. 

“And I’m going visit him in prison!” Hamilton said.

“That’s better,” Washington said. “Go on, take a break, let him know we’re thinking of him.”

“We’re thinking of him,” Hamilton repeated. “We’re not negotiating for his release immediately, are we?”

“Not until their price comes down,” Washington said. Suddenly, the rest of his correspondence needed his attention. “And I’m sure that will happen sooner than you expect, once they realize how little his wealthy father cares about his well-being and how much he eats.”

“I’ll ride out then,” Hamilton said. “And I’ll let him know. Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“He’s fine, Alexander, so don’t be rash,” Washington called out after him. Hamilton doubled back so Washington could continue. “I know you saw how the British treat their prisoners, but Philadelphia isn’t New York. More than that, I don’t know that the British could tear asunder what God has dragged out of Savannah and brought back to you.”

“I’ll be sure to tell John that,” Hamilton said.

“Well,” Washington said. “Don’t let it go to his head.”

*

“No,” Lafayette scoffed. “No, they wouldn’t harm him, not when he’s a well-bred little gentleman like their officers.”

Hamilton had loaded his few bags on his horse: messages from the General to persons in Philadelphia, supplies for the road, and a few things Hamilton had collected among his effects for Laurens’s return. 

“I’m sure they’re feeding him better than he would eat here, and it’s difficult to be upset when eating English food,” Lafayette said. “There’s so much of it, and so much of that sauce they love. You’ll arrive in Philadelphia and find him peacefully asleep, languid as a cat, glad to have a break from all this.” 

“I hope so,” Hamilton said.

“And he’s a gentleman,” Lafayette repeated. “They captured him fairly, and he was good enough to go with them in the first place, then all the way to Philadelphia. Really, don’t trouble yourself, it’s all perfectly sound.”

“All right, all right, I know when I’m being placated,” Hamilton said. “I’ll give him your regards and if you’re wrong—if he’s so much as missing a button from his uniform—you’re to come to Philadelphia and help us both escape from prison.”

“I don’t need this bullshit to find the war interesting, Hamilton,” Lafayette said. “Leave already, before I write some letters and suggest a better place for Laurens—like Australia. I’d like to see you talk your way out there, or _out of_ there.”

*

Hamilton had a good two and a half days’ ride to Philadelphia, arriving there in late July when the heat and humidity fell like a wool blanket over the city. He dismounted his horse on the Jersey side of the Delaware and stared at the city awaiting him. The heat was something he had dreamed of with longing during that frozen winter in Valley Forge, but here it was different and worse. It felt feverish, with a choking thickness that Hamilton had to overcome before taking the ferry to Philadelphia proper. 

He could only think of Laurens, like the idiot he was. He thought of how he would find him: a bare, dirty prison as he had seen in his home country, or worse, the prison ships that the British kept in New York harbor, where prisoners died daily and their bodies were thrown overboard within sight of people’s homes. The British had made such a fucking fuss over whether they would treat their American captives as foreign prisoners of war (like the French or Spanish, with that “gentlemanly” respect Lafayette knew) or as citizens rebelling against the crown (torture and outright murder). The answers were waiting across the river, as was Laurens, and all he had to do was pay the ferryman and find out for himself what had become of his dearest friend. 

In the city, Hamilton introduced himself, offered his papers, and rode past the makeshift barracks and prisons to the residential area of the city. The area had some solid, wealthier houses built here and there, most of them with a tall brick wall surrounding the house and gardens. The Southern officers, including Laurens, were staying at a small commandeered house on Arch Street. 

The guard who escorted Hamilton to the house opened the gate and shouted up at the open windows: “A visitor for Colonel Laurens!”

“A lovely house,” Hamilton commented to the guard. He tied up his horse at a post within the house’s walls and lifted his bags off. 

“He shouldn’t get used to it,” the guard replied. 

The front door opened onto the garden path. There was John, missing _two_ buttons from his coat. 

“It’s you,” John said as he rushed down the path and the guard fucked off. “I didn’t even ask who was here, I didn’t care, because _I knew_ , because who else would ride four days to see me?”

“For you?” Hamilton said. “I did it in two.”

“You goddamned liar,” John laughed. “Even your brass balls can’t handle a cavalry’s pace, no matter how much you think you love me.”

They reached for each other, pulling the other in tightly, all their uniform buttons digging into Hamilton’s chest as he pulled in Laurens closer. 

“You jackass,” Hamilton whispered. “How could you get yourself captured? Wasn’t it enough to get shot at Brandywine?”

“Didn’t have a choice,” Laurens said. “I promise, I did my best to die for Savannah, but—”

“It’s not allowed,” Hamilton said. “It’s not allowed, you’re not _allowed_.”

“You’re digging into my shoulder,” Laurens said. 

“Shit, I’m sorry, it’s the goddamned humidity and I’m sure I’m not making it any better,” Hamilton said.

“Yeah, that humidity,” Laurens said with some wariness. 

Hamilton pulled away and held Laurens by his good shoulder. “Did you get shot again? In the _same fucking shoulder_?”

“Look, it’s complicated—”

Hamilton readjusted his bags and dragged Laurens into the house, waiting for directions to his room. “We’re gonna look at that damn shoulder because so help me if I leave here and you get a fever and die and _then what_.”

“You’ll write something nice about me,” Laurens said as he led Hamilton up the stairs of the house. “A new _Iliad_ about all the cool shit you did after my death gave you the courage to fight forever.”

“Don’t be so morbid,” Hamilton said. “And I can’t do hexameters, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“ _John Laurens_ scans as a dactyl,” Laurens said. “I’m just saying, I was made for verse.”

Laurens opened the door to his modest room and let Hamilton take it in for a moment. Large bed, small nightstand, two large windows that let in the worst of Pennsylvania’s hellish weather. 

“Not bad for prison,” Hamilton said. He pushed Laurens inside and closed the door behind them, then urged Laurens against the door, back pressed up to it. Hamilton dropped his bags and stripped off his coat and Laurens’s, then immediately slipped a hand under Laurens’s shirt, feelings his ribs just under the skin, the chills along him despite Satan’s own breath soaking into the city just outside those windows. He kissed Laurens and dug a hand into his hair, then untied the ribbon and let his fingers tangle again in his curls. Laurens tipped his head back and broke the kiss, eyes closed and gasping like the air had been stolen from his lungs. 

Hamilton nudged his arms up and untucked the rest of Laurens’s shirt, pulling it off over his head. Laurens leaned in to kiss him again, but Hamilton pushed him back and looked to his shoulder.

“Oh, come on, it’s just a shoulder, it’s still there,” Laurens said. 

“I brought more bandages and that liniment they used at camp for your _last_ bullet wound, just in case of something like this, so sit on that bed and shut up because I’m not fucking you until I’ve looked at your shoulder.”

Laurens glared at him, then picked up his shirt and their coats from the floor and sat on the bed, as instructed. Hamilton sat next to him and Laurens turned so they could face each other. 

“I wouldn’t be this easy if it hadn’t been almost a whole year since I’ve seen you,” Laurens said. “Believe me. _Believe me_.”

“Whatever,” Hamilton said as he took out the small leather bag with the travel supplies from the camp infirmary.

“You know, I studied medicine for a whole minute, before my dad told me to switch to law,” Laurens said. “I know what infection looks and feels like. I can take care of myself.”

“But you don’t,” Hamilton said. He rested a hand on the gauze covering Laurens’s shoulder wound and looked him plain in the face. “You think I don’t know you? You think we don’t know each other by now? Who pulls the pen out of my hand and drags me to bed? Who sits and talks with me until I’m done eating, just to make sure I eat? Who thinks that, if he’s stupid enough to die tomorrow, I’m going to write him 20,000 lines of the worst poetry the world's ever seen?”

Laurens turned his face away from Alexander, eyes turned to the view outside the windows. Hamilton focused on his supplies again, trying not to give in and kiss him. The lines of his profile looked like a coin or a bust brought to life right in front of him, lines whose detail and shadow he’d almost forgotten in the year since Laurens left for the South. His freckles were endless, Hamilton forgetting, somehow, just how many covered Laurens’s cheeks, his shoulders, his chest, every damn part of him. 

“Poetry’s garbage,” Hamilton said as he lifted the old gauze and took more to dab at the wound that, actually, looked okay, so maybe he could lighten up by 0.05%. 

“You seem like a poetry lover,” Laurens said. “Maybe it’s just your blue-violet eyes, like a sunset while a storm still lingers.”

Hamilton made sure Laurens saw how much that repulsed him, then turned his deeply poetic eyes down and away from where Laurens could see them. 

"You know my eyes are brown, dick," Hamilton said. “And I had to read a lot of poetry, like _a lot of it_ , because you rich American and British and French assholes speak in this coded mix of Bible references and classical references specifically designed to keep outsiders like me from understanding you,” Hamilton said. 

“This from the motherfucker whose paragraphs wrap around their point longer than Cicero,” Laurens said. “That's rich.”

“That’s rhetoric, not poetry,” Hamilton said, defensive. “You love my paragraphs.”

“Sure, but you ever tried reading one aloud?”

Hamilton’s eyes darted up again before he shrugged, the closest he’d get to admitting his writing might have room for improvement.

“I’m going to wrap your shoulder,” Hamilton said as Laurens winced at whatever shit he was putting over the wound to minimize scarring. “So when I fuck you, we both remember not to pull at your arms and tear a new hole in you. In your arm, at least.”

“That’s poetry, I’m telling you,” Laurens said. Hamilton glanced up; Laurens was still looking out the window, now more out of actual interest in the whole lot of steaming nothing that was nature rather than Hamilton’s overbearing. “I’ll read your _Iliad_ to me as long as there’s lots of scenes where we fuck on Washington’s desk.”

“Jesus Christ, that was _one time_ and I still feel weird about it,” Hamilton muttered. 

“Hush, goddess,” Laurens said. “Hush and listen to Hamilton throwing himself on the ground, sobbing for fallen Laurens, for all the—”

Hamilton jabbed him in the shoulder and got whipped in the face with Laurens’s curls for the trouble. 

“Christ, you demon, it’s _first do no_ fucking _harm_ , did you miss that book! I’ll get you a copy, I promise!”

Hamilton wrapped his hands around Laurens’s wrists and looked him full on in the face. “If you died, I wouldn’t write a poem. Not a line, not a word, not a syllable of anything anyone could call beautiful.” He gripped John’s wrists again. “Your dad’s in England or France or hell, for all I fucking care. Your brother, sister, they’ve gone off to live their own lives and have nothing to do with the war. If you go South again and you die, I’ll never hear about it. No one’ll write to me. No one’ll ride up to camp and break it to me gently, tell me your last words, show me they took the ring off your finger and the medals off your coat, give them to me for safekeeping. No one’s gonna look in your pockets for a letter to me, some last little thing for me before you rode out and got shot. No—I’ll be sitting at my chair in Washington’s tent, reading through his mail, and there’s your name, waiting for me, lying there with no one you know, and that’s _if_ they ever find you. You could just disappear one day, and I’ll never know.” 

“Alex, come on, it was a joke,” Laurens said. He pulled his wrists out of Hamilton’s grasp, resting his hands on Hamilton’s waist. “Come on, I didn’t.”

“No, you said you liked speeches, so here’s what you wanted,” Hamilton said. “You die, right, all noble and shit in battle, and I’ll tell our friends. Write to Lafayette, Mulligan, I’ll even tell Aaron Burr’s smug face—I’ll tell Washington. I’ll tell him yeah, sir, I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of telling your family. I’ll tell them where they can find your stuff. Your general, your camp, your last whereabouts. I’ll tell them what I know. I’ll ask them, please, tell me if you find out more. And maybe they would, but they probably won't, because who the fuck am I to you, right?” 

Laurens looked away, but Hamilton grabbed his chin and turned it back. Laurens wouldn’t meet his eyes. 

“I won’t write a single line of poetry for you,” Hamilton said. “Who do you think you are, that I could sum you up in rhymes?” 

Laurens leaned in and kissed Hamilton, then wound his arms around Hamilton’s neck. He whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then kissed a spot on Hamilton’s jaw under his ear. 

"You take me seriously," Hamilton said. "You actually see me. I'll never write you away."

"I know," Laurens said. He buried his face against Hamilton's neck, taking the moment to hold each other before one of them ruined it.

Then, Laurens whispered near Hamilton's ear:

“And I’m sorry to say this, but I gotta since I'm the only person who takes you seriously—Pope’s translation, the rhyming _Iliad_ , is _so_ out of date. Everyone who’s anyone knows the original Greek.”

“I take it back,” Hamilton said. He pulled back and closed his fist around a chunk of Laurens’s hair. “I’ll murder you myself.”

“Do no harm, first do no harm!”

Hamilton shoved all his bandaging supplies back in the bag while Laurens laughed at him.

“What happend to my fuck bandage, the one you were going to wrap me in so I didn’t get _hurt_ due to your _attentions_?” Laurens asked. 

“Yeah, fuck that,” Hamilton said as he took off his cravat and threw it in Laurens’s face. He shoved his bags off the bed and lay back, Laurens crawling over him and sitting on his hips. 

Laurens pulled Hamilton’s shirt off and put it aside with his own shirt. He rested his hands on Hamilton’s shoulders and said, “Are you okay? Don't be mad, okay, I said—” 

“I rode across _New Jersey_ for you,” Hamilton said. He changed his mind and sat up again, kept Laurens in his lap, arms around his waist. “New Jersey and that fucking river Styx over there, all so I could come here and—”

“Yeah, yeah, just take off my pants and tell my dick you missed me.”

*

Hamilton woke up later, his hair damp and mostly in his face because Laurens was reading and idly brushing a few select strands out of his face.

“I came, you came, and then you fell asleep for six hours,” Laurens said without looking up from his book. “Told you that you couldn’t handle a cavalry’s pace.”

“No, not when you, _the horse_ , fucked me right back. I didn’t know the cavalry measured their pace by orgasms-upon-arrival,” Hamilton said in between yawns. “Learning so damn much today.”

“I don’t look like a horse,” Laurens said with a sharp tug on Hamilton’s hair.

“Your words, not mine,” Hamilton said. 

“Anyway, since it’s night already,” Laurens said. “We’ll go to a tavern, get dinner and shitfaced, come back for _more_ arguing and fucking because that’s what you like, then tomorrow we’ll go out and enjoy the city.”

“I thought you were a prisoner,” Hamilton said. “Couldn’t leave the house which, by the way, a _lot_ better than the rat-infested bread-and-water cell I imagined.”

Laurens’s hand stopped moving in Hamilton’s hair. “Didn't Washington tell you the terms?” Laurens grinned when Hamilton shook his head. “I’m paroled to the entire state of Pennsylvania.”

“...the hell does that mean?” Hamilton asked. “You can... go anywhere…”

“Anywhere in Pennsylvania.”

Hamilton narrowed his eyes. “And that’s—well, it’s punishment, because Pennsylvania, but—do they know how _big_ Pennsylvania is?”

“I don’t think they know or care,” Laurens laughed. “I can go anywhere I want except across the river with you back to New Jersey.”

“Okay,” Hamilton said. “That’s—that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. What the hell’s to stop us from putting a different coat on you and taking you back across the Delaware?”

“I gave my word as a gentleman,” Laurens said. “And if I’m ever captured again they’ll shoot me on sight. Y’know, little shit like that.”

“Fuck it, let’s just stay here,” Hamilton said as he pulled the sheets over him again. “Bring me back a pork pie if you go out.”

“What the fuck kind of boarding house mistress do I look like to you?” Laurens asked. 

“More like her hot obliging daughter,” Hamilton said.

Laurens wrapped himself up in the sheets, too, since they decided to ignore the outside world for another few hours, at least. “Tomorrow we’ll go to a shop and order you a new hat.”

“The hell’s wrong with my old hat?”

“It looks like it’s seen at least two wars,” Laurens said. “Neither of them went well.”

Hamilton turned on his side towards Laurens and drifted off to sleep again. Laurens watched him for a moment, then opened his book again and angled it so he could read by the moonlight streaming into the room. 

“I meant what I said,” Hamilton mumbled, dead to the world again except at the sound of Laurens turning the pages. “What I said outside.”

“Tell me tomorrow,” Laurens said.

“You’re not allowed to die,” Hamilton said. “We have to start America, John, okay? Then we go back to New York and eat pork pies and rent an office downtown.”

“You be the lawyer, I’ll sell the pork pies,” Laurens said. 

“You can’t cook for shit,” Hamilton said, his head half on Laurens’s pillow anyway. “Gotta be lawyers. Big old office. Fat old lawyers. America. Not Columbia—some assholes want to call America that for Columbus and I yelled at them because I’ve read a book, John. I’ve read a _book_.”

“At least one or two,” Laurens agreed.

It would kill Laurens tomorrow, but Worst Doctor Hamilton was asleep so he couldn’t bitch. Laurens shifted until Hamilton was asleep on half of Laurens’s chest, because apparently he couldn’t tell the difference between down feathers and a human ribcage, and what did _that_ say about them, exactly? He wrapped an arm around Hamilton’s back and held up his book to the light again, Alexander finally not yelling at him for the first time all day.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is not [the fic with gay hat longing](https://twitter.com/screamlet/status/660999927686803456)\- ~~saving that for xmas thanks~~ [THIS IS THE FIC WITH THE GAY HAT LONGING](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5347433)


End file.
